wake me when it's over
by asteristar
Summary: "He was cold and angry and he wanted to go home but I'm sorry, I'm sorry, he sent me instead." (Margaret x John, Hunger Games AU)
1. first

It's all over very quickly. The end, and the beginning.

The beginning is quiet, it's all cotton and glass and straight lines, and when it's my name they call I walk up like I knew it was coming. Volunteer's not a thing we know here.

A thing we knew, I mean.

It's not a thing we knew there and that's why the quiet, that's why the great stretches of nothing as I climb the steps and wait for it to start being over.

/

I don't know the boy they call. Or maybe I do, but I'm not looking at him.

/

I don't see him right away. I remember all these things, these snatches, and I know he's there at the edges but I can never turn my head fast enough.

/

They dress us up in gold for the parade. Wheat and sun in our hair and it makes me ache. The boy next to me, with a name I will never know, he cries and they laugh, sharp and high and wild.

/

The knives are where I see him first. He's not very good at throwing them but the shift of his shoulders as he bends to pick them up is strong and makes me stumble back. There's a boy behind him, small and wilting, waiting for a turn, but he just throws again, the blade sinking deep this time.

/

We don't have his kind of name in 9. I learn it that night, when I'm supposed to be asleep. John. On the screen above my bed, he climbs the steps and looks out, and I wonder if he's shaking the way I did. The camera's too close to be sure but I think from the way he won't cry that there's somebody he wants to come back to.

/

They make us wait outside until it's our turn to go in, one by one. We're both near the end so soon it's just seven of us there, staring down at our knees. The girl from 12 is next to him and she looks so nervous I think she might throw up and when he doesn't move, doesn't even look at her, I think I hate him a little.

/

Out in the arena it's cold and white at first. But then the clock counts down and it's red, big slashes and stripes of red. I don't know what I do. I can never watch this part.

And then someone's hooking my elbow and dragging me away, out of the flat and into the hills, snow and low trees, and our footprints are gaping and ragged behind us. I don't look up until we're across the trail and into a notch in the rock. And it's him. Of course it is.

The parkas they gave us are thick but not so thick you can't feel the air biting through, and I'm shivering when he dumps his bag on the ground and rubs my arms.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

"What?"

"Are you hurt?"

"No," I say, and I mean to ask him why, why all this, why the hand at my elbow, but I never get around to it.

/

We don't say much else that day. The snow, falling now, slowly like dust, it muffles everything but the cannon fire, and soon we know how many of us are dead.

Snow - that's a word I know now. I didn't, then. We don't have it, down in 9, and I remember it hurt my eyes, the sun and all that white. I had to close them now and then and I wondered, I remember wondering if that was what he was waiting for. If I'd close my eyes and never open them again.

/

He kills someone the next morning. The neck, with a jerk and a twist. And I stare, I stare at his bloodless hands and I get ready to scream.

He hauls me up, tugs me in an traps my mouth against the bright scratch of his jacket.

"Don't," he says. "You see that?"

There's a hatchet on the ground, silver and sharp, with an edge of new blood. Somewhere above, the cannon goes off. I nod into his chest.

He waits, and then pushes me back. The body is by my feet and I think

I think

I think I step on her hand.

"They won't be far behind her." He picks up the axe and wipes it on her hair. "We need to go."

The trees gather together in the crease between hills, but the snow there is red and there's smoke flickering above the branches. He takes me out onto the plain instead and there's a yell, almost close by, but nobody comes.

In the middle there's the cornucopia, glittering and blue and more ice than I've ever seen before, a hundred times over. You can see right through it to the other side, where the edge yawns wide and black. We go in, and my whole body is shuddering as he nudges me back to where the ceiling is lowest.

"Won't they see us?" I ask.

"Yeah. But we'll see them, too."

The cornucopia is empty. All that's left is the boxes everything came in, and it's stupid, I know – they play it on the highlight reel later and laugh – but I climb inside, and I swear it feels warmer.

And he smiles.

/

In the night there's a storm. The world outside blurs and fades and there's not enough room in the box for him, too, so he leans against the edge and balances the hatchet on his knee.

"What will we do in the morning?"

He shrugs, and doesn't answer. I cup my hands over my mouth and let my breath warm my cheeks.

"Did you know her name?"

He looks at me. "Who?"

"The girl. The girl you killed."

A long quiet. "No." Then, "What was it?"

And I realize I don't know either.

Later, there are cries in the dark, and, drifting on the wind, the sweep and slice of a knife.

"Margaret," I say. "That's mine." I think he probably knows it already, but I say it, and it sounds so hard, all edges and corners, out here where it was never supposed to be.


	2. second

A/N: i would say that i'm surprised this is skewing as dark as it is but then again it's a hunger games au and like what was i expecting. also bless you for reading this i mean i recognize that this is not the general tone of the fandom but it's something i wanted to try and thank you for not scrolling past it. also also somebody put me out of my misery and tell me why this site is murdering my formatting.

* * *

><p>The morning comes, flat and pale. It's my turn to watch the entrance so it's me who sees the sun pixelate and focus on the arena horizon. Behind me he stirs and wakes, slowly, easily, the way I haven't been able to.<p>

"Any more cannons?" he asks.

"I don't think so." I stand up and feel a thaw start to reach down into my legs. "What do we do now?"

That's when the gift arrives. Small, with a winking light and a crisp red parachute.

"I'll get it," he says, hoisting the hatchet and sidling past me.

A blanket, and wrapped inside is a tin of soup, steam sneaking out from under the lid in wisps. There's a note. It's for me, from my district.

"Well, go on."

I look up. He's leaning back against the wall, ducking a little bit to avoid where the ceiling curves over.

"Aren't you gonna eat it?"

I'm not sure why, it's not like he expects me to, but I share.

/

They play that moment all the time, afterwards. There was no spoon so we had to keep handing the tin back and forth, and on the last pass our fingers touched for a second. And I remember wanting it to feel worse than it did.

/

(In the hours between one day and the next, he's there sometimes when I open my eyes.

"It's a shame," I say, sleep still soft in my mouth. "We were never in love at the same time."

He blinks and disappears.)

/

They come looking for us in the afternoon. Two pairs, teeth bared and cheeks smeared with pink.

He grabs my jacket and drags me out of the cornucopia, the blanket slipping off my shoulders.

"Run."

"Where?"

"There."

He's pointing to a cluster of low, young trees. Beyond them, the ground starts to rise, and boulders - glacial ones, they say in the commentary - are heaped together.

I run. I wish it were different, but I don't need him to tell me twice.

/

("We were," he says, on a different night. "We were.")

/

I find a place to hide and draw the blanket over my head. I wait for it – my eyes are shut, I'm ready, I am – but it never comes.

Four more pictures in the sky. Ten of us left.

/

When he finds me, there's blood in his hair.

I make him kneel and go out to gather snow. They didn't give us gloves and by the time I have enough, I'm numb up to my wrists.

It takes a few tries but finally I get it soft enough to smooth over his forehead. The blood comes seeping out, streaking and thin. I tilt his head up to the sun to make sure it's all gone.

"Thank you," he says.

They play that moment, too. His face, in my hands. My face, as I look away.

/

"What happened?"

"It was fine."

"But-"

"I handled it."

/

It takes a few hours for the anger to come. And when it does it's a shuttered, shallow sort of thing. There's no room for me inside it. But I keep asking.

What did you do? What did I make you do?

/

His mentor sends him something clear in a bottle I don't recognize.

"Of all the things," he says, before unscrewing the top.

"What is it? Water?"

"It's not for you, that's what it is."

He drinks it and then I can't wake him and if he gets to die like this, I'll never forgive him.

/

The boulders move in the night.

Six of us, now.

/

Someone else is in the cornucopia the next morning. I can see the vivid smudges of their jackets through the ice.

"Hey," I say. "Wake up. We should move."

He groans. Rolls up onto his hands and knees and vomits.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine."

"We should-"

"Move. I heard you."

He leads me to where the woods are thickest. There's a small circle of snow cleared away on the ground, right at the heart, and if you breathe deep you can smell the bits of fire and charred earth from the people who were here before.

"They won't come back," he says, and I don't ask how he knows.

/

That's the day he gives me the hatchet.

They ask me to carry it a lot, now. And they won't let me clean it.

/

A few trees back, there's a half-built shelter, some rope and branches looped together. We rig it up and build out a wall of snow as high as we can.

Later, when the music has played and the pictures have hovered in the sky (five left, it's five now, how can it be five) I finally ask.

"How long are you waiting?"

We haven't eaten since the soup and I can hear his stomach growl, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't look my way.

"I'm serious."

"I'm not waiting," he says. "That's not what this is. Be quiet."

"The cannons two days ago."

"I mean it. Quiet."

"How many of them were yours?"

He closes his eyes and tips his head back. The skin of his throat is new and young and I want, suddenly I want so much.

"Three," he says at last.

"Three?"

"So that's four you owe me, now."

And then he's laughing, and it's the worst thing I've ever heard.

/

I kiss him that night. Over and over, clumsy and raw and I'm so cold I can barely feel my lips. He shudders under my mouth and I wish I knew a different way to do this, but the beat of my heart is like cannon fire (four he said, it's four now, how can it be four) and oh, it feels so good.

In the footage you can tell he has his eyes open, but I didn't know it until I watched.

/

"Was it then?" they always ask. "Did you love him then?"

A handful of days in the blood and cold. The rough slide of his hands over my neck.

"Maybe. I think maybe."


	3. third

After the end there's just me. Me in black silk and furs, the hatchet in my hand and a bone crown in my hair. They let me look sad and angry, to match the ashes they spread on my cheeks, but that's only for parties and parades. For interviews and speeches they wrap me in white, red stripes running up the inside of each sleeve.

"Smile," they say. "No, not that wide."

/

One second we're so close that our eyelashes are touching and the next the music is playing and the sky is blank, stretching and empty, and he leans back and locks his fingers around my jaw.

We stay like that until it's not my jaw, it's my neck, and with his forehead tight against mine, he presses until I can hear my pulse flickering wildly.

The music stops. So does he. I take a long, heaving breath before he shoves me away.

He doesn't sleep that whole night.

/

The whole time there's wind, gentle since the storm. But the next morning it rips at us. My hair is long and dark across my face and the snow gathers in stinging drifts around my thighs. Next to me, he ducks his head and rests it against my shoulder.

And it just goes and goes. Blinding and endless, and somebody staggers past us in the white-dark, but I only know that after, watching from a pretty room in someone's pretty house.

/

Wind, and then wolves. I've never seen one before but that's what he calls them. They gather at the clearing's edge, gray and so big I could fall into their mouths and never hit bottom.

We get up, our legs trembling (mine are, at least) and we wait, but there's nothing. Just the crunch of snow as they circle.

Out on the plain somebody screams. A cannon. A long howl.

They must be saving us for last.

/

12 was the first speech, and the hardest one to make.

I thought they would make me wear the crown, but they didn't, and I cried at that, cried for a long time before it tipped into ragged laughter, bile burning in my throat.

Out in the audience everything was coal and smoke and of course this was where he lived, this was what he loved. Two women, brows stern like his, were up on the platform and I wanted to reach to them, but my arms felt so heavy.

There was only one thing I said that felt real. Right at the end, right as my heart was dropping into my stomach.

"It was. It was a mistake. Or not what I meant, anyway, not what I wanted, and I wish. I wish. I wish it were him. He was cold and angry and he wanted to go home, but I'm sorry, I'm sorry, he sent me instead."

The two women, they looked ready to kill. The guards pulled me inside, slow enough that I didn't trip, but their hands were tight like iron. And after that, I had to wear my crown every day.

/

There are four of us, now, four of us left. I don't know who the other two are, and even if I did, I couldn't picture them. His is the only face that stays in my head.

One of them finds us in the night. He's short and thick and the fire from the torch in his hand is streaming behind him in the wind, but it won't go out. The wolves let him pass, teeth wet and gleaming.

"You've been hiding too long," he says. He lifts his knife. And I try to hand over the hatchet but he - John, John John John - he stays in front of me so I can barely see.

I fight my hair away from my eyes. The other boy shifts from foot to foot.

"Is that her?"

"What do you care?"

"Saw you send her running." The knife is up, fire-bright and thirsty. "She doesn't get to do that."

Other Boy tosses the torch into the snow at our feet, and we stumble back. I try to grip the hatchet tight but my fingers want so much to let go.

"Show me your hands, 9."

"Just stay behind me, okay?"

"I said show me your hands."

He lunges and grabs my parka, pulling me out into the center of the clearing. I can feel John scrabbling to hold on but the knife flashes, once, twice, and the cold barrels onto my skin.

John's hands are torn, ribbons of blood tumbling out of them, and my parka is in tatters on the ground.

I don't know how I manage it, but I still have the hatchet.

My first swing is big, shaking. I yell and yell, and the wolves are a knot around us, John helpless and wild-eyed and alone on the outside.

Other Boy darts towards me and it hurts, a long raking across my ribs, but I'm breathing.

The second and third, the fourth, they're all the same. Heaving lungs and a sick thud in the snow as it wrenches me to my knees. John's calling my name but it doesn't matter, and the other boy is pressing in as my blood presses out of me, and it's my fifth swing that cracks his head open.

Just like that.

He falls slowly, one limb collapsing at a time. I'm staggering up and it's everywhere, it's all over me, sticky and cooling and

The cannon

And a hand on my shoulder.

Later, they try to tell me I knew. But I didn't, it was so fast, and four of us, remember, four and only one dead.

The other boy falls, and the cannon, and a hand on my shoulder, and then John is falling, too.

/

The first time I watch the broadcast I barely recognize anything. Five die right away, before we splinter into groups, and only minutes after that the other pair, the pair that isn't us, they stick each other and watch themselves bleed dry.

Seven on the first day. And it keeps going like that, bodies tumbling over each other faster than anybody thought they would.

They cut back and forth on the second day between us and the other groups. The careers are all together, with the girl from 4 following along behind them. In other places it's clusters of three or four, and the boy from 9, the boy I don't know, he's off on his own. He dies the next day.

The careers kill two on the second night. The girl from 4, and one of their own. They show it on a split screen, the dying and us, me and him in the cornucopia, just barely asleep.

I watch the next part with my eyes closed. I can hear him killing. I can hear him killing for days after.

There's fighting on the fourth morning, and they keep switching the cameras back to us, to me washing the blood from his hair, to the silent waiting we do up in the rocks. When the boulders move in the night, they steers themselves around us to leave us be.

And the rest of it, those two days in the woods, well, the rest of it I know.

/

He took so long to die.

That's the part I remember. Not the twitch and stretch of my muscles, not the way my head was the last part of me to turn. Just how I leaned over him for what must've been hours until he closed his eyes.

I guess I moved, to make room for them to come and get him, but I'd need the footage to tell you how.

They say the wolves kept me warm. They say the last girl came to find me and that the wolves tore her to pieces. They say a lot of things.

When they ask about that night, I talk about the ash that was under his fingernails, too deep for his prep team to clean out.

It's not enough. It's the best I can do.

/

I think the most about this one moment, from the transport out, before the cameras and before the replays in living rooms in every district.

You could sit down anywhere you wanted, I remember that, and we were next to each other as they came around to give us our trackers. He got his first and it looked like it wouldn't hurt, but mine did, and I breathed in sharp.

"You okay?" he said.

And I said, "Yeah."

It's fading around the edges these days. Sometimes he says something else, almost the same but not quite. The look in his eyes, though, the promise I'm only just starting now to see, that's always there. And maybe it's fading but it's mine, just his and mine.

Everything was about to be something.

It was all about to start.

* * *

><p>AN: and we're done with this one! thanks for reading! (reviews always appreciated but you do you, man. you do you.)


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